A Special Purpose Signature Scheme for Secure Computation of Traffic in a Distributed Network

S. Sree Vivek¹⁺, S. Sharmila Deva Selvi¹, Ramarathnam Venkatesan², and C. Pandu Rangan¹

¹TCS Lab, BSB 324

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering

IIT Madras, Chennai, India. 600036

{svivek, sharmila, prangan}@cse.iitm.ac.in

²Microsoft Research

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, Washington 98052, USA

venkie@microsoft.com

Abstract

We study the problem of traffic aggregation in a network with some natural security constraints. Here each node i has traffic (number of packets) m_i and they forward this information through the network to a server node which wishes compute ∑m_i. The sever node should not be able to know any additional information about mi’s and an intermediate node should not be able to tamper (without detection) the traffic information it is forwarding. We formalize this problem and suggest a solution using a variant of aggregate signatures, and prove its security using standard hardness assumptions.

Keywords: aggregate signature scheme with message aggregation, random oracle model,

network traffic computation, secure computation of total traffic

+: Corresponding author: Tel: +91-0091-4422575387, Email: svivek@cse.iitm.ac.in

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),

Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 46-60, December 2012 [pdf]